I am Keren Brown(note: Keren with 2 E's), a food obsessed, recipe crazed foodie!
I am dedicated to getting Seattle the foodie recognition it deserves.Hey! Seattle should be in every issue of Food and Wine. Read about Seattle events,
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Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Win Tickets to Chocolate Salon!

Last July, I was asked to be one of the judges at The Seattle Chocolate Salon. So I waddled to the Chocolate Salon event, 7 months pregnant with lots of room for the chocolate. I ate until I couldn't breathe anymore and the baby was doing summersaults in my belly.

This year, the Chocolate Salon is back. If you like chocolate, you will be in heaven. So many different types of chocolate and unlimited amounts of every kind of truffle, dark, milk possible. There were flavors like blue cheese, tequilla, lime and so many more.

You think it's your cup of cacao? Well, I have two tickets to give away to this event. Let me know what your favorite chocolate is or tell me a funny chocolate story? Add it in the comments section and I will choose the winner by Monday. Tell a friend about it and you have a better chance of winning. If they win, they can take you.

13 comments:

I think my favorite Chocolate story I have is from my 7th birthday growing up in Oakland. I had a Monster themed Birthday and at the time my mother was dating a rather creative type who was a chef by trade. He helped me create an intricate plaster of paris full helmet that acted as a mask in the likeness of Frankenstein with bolts in the neck and all. To give me the edge over the other Monster costumes coming to the party in the park that day, he decided to make my favorite cake in the likeness of Frankenstein too. I love German Chocolate Cake and so he fashioned a perfect replica of the mask we made for me into a German Chocolate cake with Brown Coconut Hair and Brownish-Green Skin Chocolate Butter Cream Frosting. And to make sure the cake was perfect he even fused some silver bauble candy pearls together to make bolts in the neck like my own. I felt pretty cool, however if I remember correctly I think I also cried and threw a temper tantrum. What do you expect when you make a Chocolate Monster God on his Birthday!

I think my favorite chocolate story is this: http://photos-c.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs115.snc1/4964_763161590998_10732692_43729954_4767661_n.jpg

The time I went on a Theo Chocolate tour. Not only is their chocolate really amazing, but their tours are so informative -- you get to see how chocolate is made start to finish! And those hairnets -- aren't they just gorgeous? :P hahaha.

This isn't a funny chocolate story but I think it's a worthwhile story about chocolate--and why it's special. Yachana Gourmet is a Fair Trade organic chocolate company out of the Amazonian Rainforest in Ecuador. In college I completed my School of Agriculture senior thesis on the company's business model-partly because I love how chocolate tastes and partly because I think chocolate as agriculture is so unique. It's unique because here in the states we have to import the cacoa bean- for which has been notoriously exploiting indigenous tribal peoples for way more than 200 years-similiar to coffee bean. By now we all have heard about Fair Trade Certification and know that it is an organized, market driven and counter response to this exploitation. Yachana Gourmet Chocolate profits return to the Rainforest from which its beans are grown- and to the people who delicately tend to it. These tribal people who before Yachana were cutting down the rainforest trees to make a buck. These people had no other choice because outsiders were coming to do it anyways. So in effect, Yachana is preserving thousands of acres of rainforest, a tribal culture, and a unique rainforest cacoa bean flavor. As chocolate lovers know- all chocolate is not created equal. All chocolate is a product of its journey- from soil to seed to hand to ship to production to retail to mouth. Authenticity, Purity, Nature is art. I hope that this comment inspires someone to check out Fair Trade and Organic and small batch production cacao beans growers, chocolate roasters, and supporters-Like Frantic Foodie.in health and happiness,Maggie Staffordwww.fullcirclefarmorganics.wordpress.com

I recently went to Antonville Winery in Woodinville. They paired up wines with chocolates - two of the chocolates were actually made with Antonville wine. The Cabernet Sauvignon Chocolate was delish and the chili pepper truffles had me fanning the flames from my mouth. Yum Yum!

When i was a kid, probably one of the first time i was left home alone, I raided the cabinets for some munchies. I found a bix ol' container of hershey's baking chocolate, and not knowing what baking cocoa was, I grabbed the biggest spoonful and ate it. Talk about bitter beer face. I still can remember how disgusting it tasted. Now that i'm older and actually like things like vinegar, i can probably appreciate the taste a bit more, but as a kid... no bueno.

Also as a kid, my Grandma would always get big packages of german chocolate from my Great Grandma near Munich. German chocolate is unlike any other I think, and to a kid it is straight crack. I've been busted more than once eating over 5 bars, because it was always followed up with the obligatory belly ache and the trots. My grandma could always tell why i'm hurtin. Must be all that cream they use :p

Short and sweet -- which is appropriate, right? When I was in my 20s I worked with someone who could buy a candy bar and eat little bits of it every day so that the bar would last for an entire week. That was just crazy to me. Anyway, one day she asked if I wanted to go get something sweet, and my response was, "Yes! Oh my god, I just realized I hadn't had chocolate today!" She started, then died laughing, saying, "Man -- I thought you were going to say 'in months' or something the way you said that!" That's when I knew I had a problem.

[Sidenote: apparently, dark chocolate is worse for your health according to my former nutritionist. Go figure. But, hey, everything in moderation, right? Now, one of the benefits of eating chocolate is great due to the fact that it kicks in the endorphins in your brain. Ah.]

Funny chocolate story: Once, my friend was dog sitting and she left some chocolate out. The dog ate about 1 lb. of chocolate (Dogs are NOT supposed to eat chocolate). Thankfully, no, it didn't die. Phew! =)

Of all the Belgium chocolate I had while there, and all of the yummy chocolates I have here in Seattle, my best story follows. Note, I don't say funny (although I found it quite amusing):

My sister got a new puppy and I was babysitting it for the day. The puppy wasn't into peanut butter, so I asked her if I could give the pup nutella. She said "sure".

I happened to be talking with an old friend, a dog lover, and told her what I was going to do and she said "DO NOT GIVE THE DOG NUTELLA! DOGS CANNOT HAVE CHOCOLATE!!! It is POISONOUS to them. They go blind!"

To this day I give my sister a hard time for allowing me to almost blind her dog...

My favorite and funniest chocolate story: I was visiting friends in Burgundy, France and we visited a small local "chocolatier". At the end of the tour, we were brought to a sample room with trays and trays of all types of luscious chocolates and we were left alone in there!!! It was like a chocolate dream come true. In a panicked frenzy, my friend and I stuffed our pockets with as much chocolates as we could, pretending to eat only one as our tour guide came back. So innocent! We gorged ourselves outside and I will not go into details about the mess but it was so worth it!

My very first memory actually involves chocolate. I wasn't even one and at the time Nesquik came in giant heavy tin boxes. My dad drank a lot of cocoa and I always wanted some. My mom had me in the grocery cart and parked me next to the Nesquik while she grabbed something off a higher shelf. I wanted a can of it and was trying to make that clear, so was very upset when she told me no. I decided to try and grab one myself but it was so heavy I dropped it and it slammed into my little sandaled foot on the way to the ground. Oh it hurt! I still have a secret love for nesquik even though I never buy it. My first food desire :)

My sister and I are visiting Seattle for the first time in mid-July, so imagine our excitement when we heard about the Chocolate Salon and realized that our visit falls right on the 12th! My funny chocolate story actually involves my sister as well. One of my favorite online pastimes is to read reviews about delicious treats, especially anything with chocolate. About a year ago, my curiosity was piqued when I kept encountering raves for the Vosges Bacon Bar. Bacon and chocolate? Since I couldn't find the Bacon Bar in stores (and the hefty $8 price tag was a bit out of my wallet's comfort zone anyway), I decided to concoct my own version. Being a night owl, it was around midnight when inspiration struck so I was limited to the ingredients already on hand: turkey bacon and a plastic baggie of chocolate chips. I fried and chopped the bacon, then stirred it into the melted chocolate... it looked pretty tasty! Somehow (I think I'd already brushed my teeth) I restrained from sampling the mixture and went to bed. The next day, I found my sister absolutely HORRIFIED in the kitchen. She had seen the chocolate chilling in the refrigerator and helped herself to a large chunk of what she assumed would be a delicious sweet treat. Unfortunately, not only was the turkey bacon a poor idea, it turned out that I had inadvertently used MINT chocolate chips (I didn't even know we had mint chocolate chips!). Let me tell you... mint/chocolate/bacon does not a good combination make. I tried a tiny piece and couldn't spit it out fast enough. Since then, what we lovingly refer to as "the MCB Incident" never fails to bring a simultaneous laugh and grimace to our faces!

I'm Lee's sister, the victim of the aforementioned MCB incident! That ranks as one of my funniest chocolate memories as well, but I do have another chocolate-related story to share. I was in second grade, visiting my friend Emily's house, and her older brother kept bothering us. We were playing "mailbox"—which involved us writing letters to each other (whilst sitting about ten feet apart), decorating them with stickers, and "mailing" them to each other by placing the letters in a miniature tin mailbox we placed between us. Her brother Nathan wanted us to stop being sooo boring and play Nerf ball with him, but we were happily engaged in our letter-writing activity. He began running by and pouring dirt on top of our papers as we wrote, until Emily finally tattled to her mom and got Nathan in trouble. He was promptly sent to his room. An hour later, he came outside with two plastic cups of chocolate milk and apologized for being so mean earlier. I vividly remember taking a huge swig of the milk, only to spit it out all over my shoes—this was definitely NOT chocolate milk. It tasted like DIRT...because it was! Nathan had mixed dirt into water as revenge for us getting him in trouble (of course, this ultimately resulted in him getting in even more trouble). It took a long, long time before I was able to drink chocolate milk without carefully inspecting the contents beforehand! You would think this story and the "MCB incident" have made me hesitant to put anything chocolate in my mouth, but nope, that's not the case at all. :)